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chicago web design for emotionThe days of designing a website that does nothing more than showcases your products and services are over. You must go further to reach your potential customers. You need to appeal to their emotions.

Consider life insurance companies. They learned long ago that people weren’t interested in talking about their impending deaths and the financial ramifications for their families. So insurers began to appeal to their audience’s positive emotions. Take a look at their websites. They’re designed to inspire sentiments like trust, love, optimism and joy.

Our Chicago web design company goes to great lengths to create sites that reach visitors on an emotional level. Hard-hitting sales copy that trumpets your products’ benefits isn’t enough. Your website should have an aesthetic that encourages visitors to engage with your brand.

An added bonus is that your site will stand head and shoulders above those that neglect emotion in their design.

Designing For Emotion To Boost Your Conversions

Your most important goal is to increase your conversions. That can include sales, downloads of a white paper or joining your mailing list.

Your biggest obstacle is logic, or specifically, how the brain processes and responds to marketing content. In 2011, UCLA researchers found that ads that used rational reasoning were more likely to trigger activity in the brain that inhibited a response. In contrast, the use of “non-rational influence” lowered subjects’ inhibitions.

The researchers’ findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, confirmed what smart web designers have known for ages. Appealing to visitors’ emotions has a positive effect on conversions, and that holds doubly true for Chicago web design.

The question is, how do you design your website to take advantage of that fact?

How To Infuse Your Site With Emotion

When it comes to emotional web design, you have a lot of options.

For example, you can appeal to visitors’ tendency to prefer attractive things. To that end, design your site to be visually stunning and easy to navigate.

  • You can appeal to visitors’ sense of family and parental instinct.
  • Photos of smiling children and happy babies can be extremely effective depending on your audience.
  • You can appeal to visitors’ desire for success and happiness.
  • Images of successful individuals can inspire people to put themselves in those individuals’ shoes.

Emotions reinforce perceptions and dictate behavioral responses. In the context of web design, that means seducing visitors to take your most desired action.

The Effect Of Showing Faces On Your Site
One of the most powerful tactics for using emotion in your web design is by including images of faces on key pages. Our Chicago web design company has made this practice an art form.

We relate to people better than we relate to ideas. Images of people instill trust. The more a person in a photo seems to reflect our values and circumstances, the greater our trust in the company behind the image.

This effect occurs on an instinctive level. It happens without our thinking about it.

In terms of relating to the person in an image, the most important feature is his or her face. It provides an instant familiarity and sense of reassurance. Even though the individual displayed in an image is a stranger to us, the inference that he or she has benefited from doing business with the company gives us comfort.

We see ourselves in that person. If they’re smiling, we imagine we’ll be similarly delighted by following their lead (e.g. buying the company’s products).

This effect is even more pronounced with the use of close-ups. When an image is composed entirely of a smiling, confident face, we’re more apt to consider the photographed person’s intelligence and character. Our ability to relate to the individual will influence our decision-making, including whether or not to make a purchase.

Chicago Branding Company Trumpets Emotional Design

In 2016, websites that neglect visitors’ emotions will pay a steep price through a lower conversion ratio. Fortunately, it’s an easily solved problem. Evaluate every important page on your site and ask yourself whether images showing confident, happy people will appeal to your audience.

Chances are, they will.

If your site is not currently designed for emotion, it’s time to renovate it. The upside is that your site will be better equipped to stimulate a positive emotional response from your visitors.

Design & Promote is a Chicago web design company with years of hard-won experience building sites that deliver measurable results. Contact our team today to create a plan for increasing your conversions and making 2016 your best year yet!